Walmart Inc (NYSE: WMT) stock lost over 0.8% on June 5th, 2018 (as of 9:58 AM GMT-4; Source: Google finance) but recovered over 7.3% this year (Source: Finviz).
Competition still remains a concern to investors. As Matt Fassler from Goldman Sachs pointed in yesterday’s call, Most of Walmart’s GMV is still at this stage 1P while major global e-commerce competitors have large 3P businesses. But the third-party marketplace is growing faster than first party. The group is now up to 75 million SKUs on the website. They are also expanding the number of SKUs offering 2-day delivery on every day. They are also continuing to aggressively bring more, more SKUs into the warehouses. The group is aiming 2-day, even 1-day, delivery via ground in a single box. The group intends to leverage their 4,700 stores to do same-day delivery while started to roll out Greg’s team same-day delivery capabilities out of the brick-and-mortar stores. There are over 100,000 products that are currently available for same day in some stores.
Management continues to be bullish on their e-commerce performance as seen in the first quarter and remains a priority. They see the importance of omni-channel experience to customers. The group also continues to focus on Sam’s Club and accordingly invested there growing Sam’s partially through acquisitions.
The group also sees a solid potential on their Flipkart acquisition in India. E-commerce flag of Flipkart itself, is a major merchandise site but also has other core brands like Myntra and Jabong which are apparel, clothing retailers. The other part of it is the infrastructure which is eKart, a logistics arm of Flipkart, operating at over 800 cities already. Within the Flipkart group, there is also PhonePe which is the payments business. The major function for this is to facilitate payments which is linked in to the banks in India. This is also an opportunity to capture as India is digitizing and while mobile payments have been rising.
Meanwhile, Walmart is targeting 40% e-commerce growth, and have already achieved 33% during the first quarter.